Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Tea Kettle Tree

It was 1:30 a.m. and I was walking Bella through my dark Curtis Park neighborhood, when I heard a tea kettle whistle coming from a tree. "Well, this is a novelty," I thought. "My neighborhood gets stranger by the day."

I traced the noise to the roots at the base of the tree, so I got down on all fours in the shadows and started digging through the leaf litter to find the source. I explained to Bella, "I'm not crazy. I'm not talking to a spirit in the tree, like Cinderella does with her Mother, or talking to the tree, like Frodo does with the Ents. I'm just trying to find the entrance to Peter Pan's underground Neverland lair, because he left the tea kettle on the stove." Meanwhile, Bella was buzzing about like "my master is so crazy."

Eventually, I uncovered a plastic water pipe, and even though there was no obvious air or water leak, I'm sure it was the culprit of the noise.